


The Scythe and The Kraken

by kenniiohontesha



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alannys Harlaw Deserves Better, Alannys Harlaw origin story, Alannys Stan is Bored At Work and Banged This Puppy Out, Are The Straights Okay, Brain Damage, Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, asha would probably kill it as a soccer mom she's literally holding everything together, definitely a lot of my own personal takes on the books specifically when i first read them, internalized ableism, lots of my own headcanons just from the past few years, nothing too intense tho, painfully anachronistic dialogue probably, post-adwd, pre-greyjoy rebellion, slight tw for medieval attitudes towards physical disability, sorry for any horribly ridiculous timeline errors i literally failed 9th grade math, sorry for any typos or run-on sentences i wrote this when i had heat stroke, thats pretty much it i think lmk if u want me to mention anything else as a tw, tw for ramsay as a concept, weird arranged marriage dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 10:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenniiohontesha/pseuds/kenniiohontesha
Summary: post-ADwD/pre-Greyjoy Rebellionhalf Alannys's memories of her late teens/early adulthood, half Asha bringing Theon and Jeyne back to Harlaw and everything that comes after thati haven't been on here in forever and im bad at describing skskskkss just read it





	The Scythe and The Kraken

It had been her entire world. Higher and longer and wider and deeper and older than anything she could have imagined. The island, the castle, the sea around it once she was old enough to sail. There was a line she had never crossed and would never plan to cross. Everything was here, everything she knew, everything she cared to know. When your island is named after your house, when you are as integral to the landmass as the rocks and dirt and sand, how far can you really go before you cross the line and can’t find your way back?

Through angry tears, Alannys watched as Ten Towers grew smaller and smaller, until the individual rocks in the cliff could not be made out. The sea had been nearly black that day, the sky overcast. She couldn’t tell if the chill that ran through her was from the wind or simply the product of a mix of dread, impending homesickness and the realization that she now belonged to somebody else. She wrapped her thick scarf tighter around her shoulders, pulling her dampening hair back as the sea spit mist up over the edges of the single ship that was taking her across the line. _I’ll be with child before long,_ she thought to herself with a bitter taste in her mouth. She had to count herself lucky, her father had done her the courtesy of waiting until she’d reached fifteen, some highborn girls marry as young as twelve. She tried to tell herself that Quellon’s son was at least younger than she’d expected at twenty-two, she wouldn’t be marrying some disgusting old man. She’d seen Quellon’s son once before, several years prior. He was a wiry young man, brooding and almost rat-faced, but he wasn’t ugly, he didn’t repulse her. _When we consummate the marriage, at least I’ll be able to do it with my eyes open._

Her earrings, large clamshells made of steel and hung on delicate chains, swung against her neck. They’d gone cold from the wind. Her stomach still churned and the Arbor Red from last night wasn’t helping the situation. Gwynesse had a weak stomach and had been stumbling after one cup but Alannys was better at holding her wine and had out-drunk Rodrik at five and a half cups before the cask ran dry. She had been drunk by that point and cried while her brother stroked her hair with awkward hands. Rodrik had never been one to understand other people but for her sake he tried. _He’ll make a good husband to some lucky girl as long as she doesn’t mind his introversion. Gwynesse, however, will make a terrible wife_.

The thought of her siblings made her stomach drop again. They would only be a day’s sail away but the distance seemed infinite and would seem bigger still from the castle Alannys would soon call her home. She could still feel willful girlish energy stirring in her bone marrow. She remembered when her uncle had taught her how to throw an axe, how her father had laughed and her mother had squealed as the axe lodged itself in the wooden target, sending splinters in every direction. She thought of cracking lobster shells with her bare hands and throwing the exoskeletons of shrimp at the back of her sister’s head to see if the tiny dead things would stick in the thick chestnut curls or fall to the dining hall floor, catch her attention or stay in place until someone else noticed. At one particular feast, Gwynesse had tried to shamelessly flirt with a boy from Orkmont, but he grimaced and drew a butter-soaked shrimp casing from her hair. The colour her face had turned had been nearly inhuman and Alannys had laughed so hard she thought she might retch. Father tried to scold her but broke off cackling before he could think of a suitable reprimand and even Gwynesse began to laugh, picking up the shells and throwing them right back.

It had been at a feast where she had met Ylana Pyke.

Her father was a Northerner who fucked a wench from Saltcliffe, giving her a daughter who seemed to radiate saccharine warmth despite the ice and seawater in her blood. She had her mother’s red hair and green eyes but the brown skin and regal bone structure of the First Men and when Alannys kissed her for the first time her lips tasted like peaches. They sat together through the entirety of the feast, at first Alannys had seen her as a new best friend (to replace her insufferable sister) but as the night continued and the ale flowed, Alannys felt her hand travel to Ylana’s thigh and Ylana’s lips to her neck. They escaped to the beach, to the tide pool in the shadow of the Book Tower where Alannys went to be alone. She had never shared that place with anyone, she never intended to after Ylana, Ylana was special. They stripped completely and swam to the little sandbar where the sea became shallow enough to stand. They hid amongst the rocks and Alannys prayed that the Drowned God would keep their secret, then prayed that she wouldn’t sink like a rock having eaten so much before swimming. Ylana’s hair had become met and was so straight it plastered flat to her head and shoulders while Alannys’s curls tangled together in a thick knot that she would have to rip through with a comb in the morning.

They talked, they kissed, they did many other things under a sky full of stars so bright they looked like tiny diamonds and a moon that looked like one of the saltwater pearls in the necklace Alannys would be married in. When Alannys woke the next morning, the smell of sea fading from her hair, she thought she must have dreamed of Ylana, but to her relief, she looked out her window and saw a red haired girl in a long green dress riding over the hill towards town. When Alannys looked in her mirror, she had a bruise on her neck the exact size and shape of Ylana’s mouth. When Rodrik inquired (loudly) about it, she told him she’d burned herself. He asked with what, she left the room.

As Ten Towers grew smaller and smaller, Alannys considered the obscene luck it would take for her to see Ylana Pyke again, especially in the same context. _The Queen of the Iron Islands has no time for low-born women, especially bastards. No, the Queen of the Iron Islands only had time for her King_. 

Balon Greyjoy was not what she pictured a king to be. Her vague memory of him was replaced with something more underwhelming than disappointing. As she sat next to him at the head table in the dining hall at Pyke, she looked him up and down and wondered how anyone could expect him to lead a kingdom. "_He’s a reaver",_ a handmaiden had told her two days prior, "_and he’ll be all yours, I wouldn’t know what to do with all that…"_

_He looks like he’s never been outside_, Alannys thought to herself. There was something about Pyke, something about the way the sun never seemed to be visible the way it was from Harlaw._ It could just be the construction of the castle, and we _are_ closer inland_. He stared straight ahead the entire feast and drank, drank more than Alannys had ever seen anyone drink, more than she thought could fit in one person, especially one so thin… He turned to her eventually, after what seemed like (and could have been) hours. There was something in his eyes that Alannys didn’t like but could appreciate, a detached pragmatism. He wasn’t interested in seducing her or performing any grand gestures. He knew as well as she did that this was an arrangement for their houses. If anything, it was a grand gesture between their fathers, a grand gesture that he would perform just as dutifully if they had a daughter. She thought it over again, _he doesn’t have to look like a king because he isn’t one yet, just like I’m not yet a queen._ Alannys felt a slight weight lift off of her, she drained her cup of wine, looking back at her husband. _Good. So I have time to grow breasts and he has time to grow facial hair_.

The wedding took place under a sky as grey as her new surname. Rain hammered the beach so relentlessly Alannys had no reservations about having to stand waist-deep in water. The downpour left the veil that hung in front of her face soaked, she felt like she was drowning. As the veil grew heavier, the diadem it was attached to, steel tentacles inlaid with pearls crossing her forehead and looping at the back of her head, her hair threaded through and hanging down her back, began to slip and she had to tilt her face skyward to keep from losing it. When she tilted her head back, the veil stuck to her face. Trying to save space in her lungs, she resigned herself to tilting back and forth when she needed to breathe, she could feel her mother’s embarrassment. The water was impossibly cold when the Drowned Priest pushed both their heads beneath the surface. In it’s frigidity, it felt remarkably clean. Alannys kept her eyes wide open as salt and sand stung her corneas, she kept her grip on Balon’s hand as the god-forsaken veil floated up off of her face. She counted out the seconds in her head as the white noise of the sea filled her ears, a dull, blank roar. When she was wrenched upwards, when her head broke the surface and the world above came rushing back and she could finally lift the hellish veil and throw it behind her, there was something new about the world. A brightness, a complexity, a new lens from which to see things. _Is this what it feels like to be a Queen?_ Alannys thought to herself she stared up at the crumbling Bloody Keep, immense and ancient but still so precarious. _Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the salt in my eyes._


End file.
